A first-hand account of life as a Japanese prisoner during the Second World War which reveals how Mitchell was taken to Japan as part of an overseas force and set to work levelling agricultural land for an airfield, before being moved to work at the furnaces of a foundry, and then to a coal mine.

Now available in paperback, Death on the Hellships chronicles the true dimensions of the Allied POW experience at sea. It is a disturbing story; many believe the Bataan Death March even pales by comparison. Survivors describe their ordeal in the Japanese hellships as the absolute worst experience of their captivity. Crammed by the thousands into the holds of the ships, moved from island to island and put to work, they endured all the horrors of the prison camps magnified tenfold. Gregory Michno draws on American, British, Australian, and Dutch POW accounts as well as Japanese convoy histories, declassified radio intelligence reports, and a wealth of archival sources to present a detailed picture of the horror.

During the Second World War the Japanese were stereotyped in the European and American imagination as fanatical, cruel and almost inhuman. This view is unhistorical and simplistic. It fails to recognise that the Japanese were acting at a time of supreme national crisis and it fails to take account of their own historical tradition. The essays in Japanese Prisoners of War, by both Western and Japanese scholars, explore the question from a balanced viewpoint, looking at it in the light of longer-term influences, notably the Japanese attempt to establish themselves as an honorary white race. The book also addresses the other side of the question, looking at the treatment of Japanese prisoners in Allied captivity.

This study, closely researched by Philip Towle over the past thirty years, is principally concerned with the military relations between Britain and Japan during the first half of the twentieth century and the ambivalence, misunderstandings and misconceptions that informed their relationship, described by the author as ‘an epic tragedy’. Following the signing of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance in 1902, Japan was held up as a model in Britain and Britain in Japan. But within a generation, the British came to see Japan as the first country to challenge the League of Nations and to begin a new age of imperialism. Conversely, the Japanese armed forces saw Britain as the greatest obstacle to Japanese ambitions in China and elsewhere. In 1936, Lieutenant Commander Tota Ishimaru’s book Japan Must Fight Britain was printed in Britain, its significance ignored at many levels, and five years later the two countries were at war. ‘The feelings stirred up by that conflict,’ notes Towle, ‘still have resonance today.’ From Ally to Enemy brings together a most important body of research that is long overdue in book form and will be widely welcomed by historians and researchers of the period, as well as those seeking more detailed analysis of specific aspects of the pre-war Anglo-Japanese military relationship.

Drawing on a wealth of new material from military, ecclesiastical and secular civilian archives, Michael Snape presents a study of the experience of the officers and men of Britain’s vast citizen armies, and also of the numerous religious agencies which ministered to them. Historians of the First and Second World Wars have consistently underestimated the importance of religion in Britain during the war years, but this book shows that religion had much greater currency and influence in twentieth-century British society than has previously been realised. Snape argues that religion provided a key component of military morale and national identity in both the First and Second World Wars, and demonstrates that, contrary to accepted wisdom, Britain’s popular religious culture emerged intact and even strengthened as a result of the army’s experiences of war. The book covers such a range of disciplines, that students and scholars of military history, British history and Religion will all benefit from its purchase.

"Result of a conference on 'Prisoners in War' conducted by the Leverhulme Programme on the Changing Character of War in December 2007 at Oxford University"--Acknowledgements.

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